Convinced that business-as-usual must be over, an increasing number of people have come together across national, disciplinary, cultural and other organisational boundaries to take climate actions and attain a more sustainable society. At the same time as organisations and state agencies have declared a ‘climate emergency’, people have taken decarbonisation into their own hands through direct and sometimes radical actions. Climate activists across generations and borders demonstrate in the streets, while people also take a stance via mundane professional actions at work and in their everyday lives. In this coming together, the pursuit of personal politics is merging with civic, state and corporate commitment to the point where, it might be argued, we are witnessing a rebirth of community relations and alternative ways of collective organising. As activism becomes increasingly dispersed and diffuse, communities are seemingly no longer tied to a specific geographical spot, organisation, group or even shared identity. This book is about this new configuration of the environmental movement and what it accomplishes – a bridging between business and society.

It is not only street protesters who proclaim climate change as a ‘crisis’, ‘disaster’ and ‘emergency’ (Höijer Reference Höijer2010, Hoggett Reference Hoggett2011), but throughout history humans have experienced the climate as uncertain and have met it with fear, anxiety, mythologising and taming (Hulme Reference Hulme2008). To emphasise the seriousness of the situation, and to align the language of the people with scientific discourse, journalists have even proposed that we should no longer be told that there is human-induced ‘global warming’, but instead ‘global heating’ (Carrington Reference Carrington2019). In line with this increased emphasis on urgency, David Attenborough, a UK-based acclaimed natural world broadcaster, told UK Members of Parliament in July 2019 that ‘we cannot be radical enough in dealing with [climate change]’ (New Scientist 2019b). People across generations agree (Thunberg Reference Thunberg2019), and popular culture is also littered with images of a dying planet, with pop artists who directly engage their young fans in climate change and environmental issues (New Scientist 2019a, Reilly Reference Reilly2019, Abidin et al. Reference Abidin, Brockington, Goodman, Mostafanezhad and Richey2020). This growing movement is reflected in opinion polls, showing that ‘93% of EU citizens see climate change as a serious problem’ (European Commission 2019). Consequently, many people seem to have been influenced by a growing knowledge movement, furthered in different media, which has made it possible to express and understand personal experiences of storms, droughts, floods and heatwaves as being caused by human polluting behaviours (Painter Reference Painter2013: Introduction). The expressed emergency has led to pockets of climate anxiousness (Weintrobe Reference Weintrobe and Weintrobe2012) and fed practices of self-critique, generative of a broader eagerness to mobilise and transform the way humans are to live and thereby survive in ‘togetherness’ with other species on Earth.

Many politicians and business leaders mimic this climate change movement and have gathered their forces to publicly call for radical and economically beneficial climate change action. Business, it is proposed, can ramp up the speed of the transition and accelerate responses (Newell Reference Newell2020). The United Nations (UN) Global Compact meeting in 2020 was tellingly entitled ‘Making Global Goals Local Business’ (United Nations 2020), and the World Bank report, ‘Growing Green – The economic benefits of climate action’, makes the strategic move beyond ‘climate adaptation’ clear. It is ‘climate action’ that is needed:

Climate Action through Renewable Energy

Renewable energy technology has become a focal point in the active response to knowledge about a potentially disastrous future of climate change, with its uncertainties and decision-making complexities (IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2011b, 2014, Howarth and Painter Reference Howarth and Painter2016). Most people can directly relate to ‘renewables’, as wind, wave and solar power technologies are often referred to. Involving both industrial actors and individual users, renewables have become one of the key paths to decarbonisation across business and society (Mitchell Reference Mitchell2008, Vasi Bogdan Reference Vasi Bogdan2011, Dauvergne Reference Dauvergne2016). Although at heart quite technical and dry, renewable energy constitutes a cornerstone in policymaking, public and private investments, business as well as civil society activity, leading to a range of concrete organisational and corporate approaches, from large-scale wind and solar farms to grassroots, self-organised renewable energy communities to individual homeowners having solar panels installed on their roofs. Renewables complemented by energy saving insulation function as useful material objects and gadgets for the mobilisation of citizens (cf. Marres Reference 275Marres2012), or even ‘activists’, governed as self-organised ‘ethical consumers’ (Dowling Reference Dowling2010:491), or ‘prosumers’, that is, people who produce, consume and at times sell by owning the means of production (Burke and Stephens Reference Burke and Stephens2017, Szulecki Reference Szulecki2018).

Renewable energy technology is compelling for many reasons, politically and existentially. Renewables are said to decouple economic growth from greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, thereby suggesting that it is possible to continuously progress economically (Jan, Farhat Durrani and Himayatullah Reference Jan, Durrani and Himayatullah2021), albeit under the auspices of sustainable development (IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2011a:16). Given that both solar and wind are sources of infinite energy, they provide an optimistic image of the future, which stands in stark contrast to the dark, depressing thoughts about disaster and the finitude of humanity on Earth.

This view of the infinity of renewables, and their seemingly indestructible non-exhaustive existence in nature, may be what creates such an alluring comfort for humans – a mentally and materially appealing focus for climate actions. This aesthetic dimension is perhaps best expressed in the art of Kurt Jackson, exemplified in the mixed media piece from 2020 Late sunlight on the tumulus bracken, Warren’s Barrow, Carland Cross, reproduced on the cover of this book. In contrast to the criticism of progress raised in debates about the Anthropocene, driven by dismissal of modernist aspirations (e.g. see Haraway Reference Haraway2015, Latour et al. Reference Latour, Milstein, Marrero-Guillamón and Rodríguez-Giralt2018), renewables seem to enable wanted technical fixes that succeed in repositioning ideals of progress and liveability. Renewables facilitate new structures, politically raised to be publicly enjoyed.

Located at the intersection of national, international and personal politics in the growing ‘knowledge economy’ (Powell and Snellman Reference Powell and Snellman2004), renewable energy has been heavily debated but also brought into citizen education programmes (Kandpal and Broman Reference Kandpal and Broman2014). Renewable energy brings both obstacles and opportunities for citizens, engineers, investors and public officials, and has under these conditions thrived and resulted in a transformation of the environmental movement (Jamison Reference Jamison2001, Toke Reference Toke2011a, Leach and Scoones Reference Leach, Scoones, Scoones, Leach and Newell2015). The Alternative Technology Movement (Harper and Eriksson Reference 267Harper and Björn1972), which grew out of environmental concerns in the 1970s, is partly responsible for this transformation and turn towards commercialisation via renewables (Eyerman and Jamison Reference 263Eyerman and Jamison1991, Smith Reference Smith2005, Elliott Reference Elliott2016). Here, the technology itself is what holds hope and agency, conceived as it is to be an already existing utopia within an immature society (Eyerman and Jamison Reference 263Eyerman and Jamison1991:76). The domains of society and business have been bridged by such a hopeful conception of renewables, not only underpinned by climate regulations, subsidies and voluntary carbon markets, but by people who come together based on their shared belief in its promises (Walker et al. Reference Walker, Devine-Wright, Hunter, High and Evans2010). From village groups to businesses, and from ‘green insider activism’ in state agencies (Hysing and Olsson Reference Hysing and Olsson2018) to employee activism in large polluting corporations (Skoglund and Böhm Reference Skoglund and Böhm2020) and ‘green investor activism’ (Belfiore Reference Belfiore2021), we are witnessing the growth of a dispersed climate activism pursued by people who take renewable energy actions across organisations. In practice, these actions manage to merge the political idea of ‘power to the people’ with the equally popular notion of ‘individual responsibility’. It is nevertheless unclear how this political entangling has succeeded in unfolding to such an extent, aided by renewables.

Despite existing climate scepticism and resistance to renewable energy, a shared worldview seems to have emerged among people who think positively about finding a solution to climate change. These people come together across national, disciplinary, cultural and other organisational boundaries to take action in the here and now. Instead of erecting structures for political change, new organisational forms arise with human efforts to accomplish change. To make sense of this broad and boundaryless movement, this book focusses on climate activism by investigating the community relations that animate it. With the growth of renewable energy solutions, we see a conglomeration of activist-business-state, massaged and glued together by a new outlook of both activism and community, which can no longer be easily distinguished as civic action (cf. Lichterman and Eliasoph, Reference Lichterman and Eliasoph2014), nor located in civil society. When environmental activism becomes boundaryless, communities become more fluid, linking the individual to the collective beyond localism and globalism (Reitan and Gibson Reference Reitan and Gibson2012, Doherty and Doyle Reference Doherty and Doyle2013). As the face of activism changes, so too does the way people are told to take action and choose to do so by gathering and pursuing their personal politics collectively. The cult of the individual, charismatic, underdog activist has in some cases been infused by, and in other instances replaced by, a communal inclusion of mundane everyday activism. We thus ask: how are community relations formed and how does climate activism bridge society and business via renewable energy technology? This is the main question this book seeks to answer.

Activism in Transition

In the 1960s and 1970s, environmental activism was, and still is, considered part of broader civil rights movements and grassroots quests for increased democratic participation (Eckersley Reference Eckersley1992). Yet, since at least the early 1990s, with the rise of neoliberal governance systems, green activism has engaged in ever closer dialogue with the private and public sectors (Hemmati Reference Hemmati2002, Dauvergne Reference Dauvergne2016). Many transnational environmental activist groups, such as WWF, Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth, with millions of supporters worldwide, challenge and resist, but also work closely together with state institutions and corporate organisations, to address environmental issues such as pollution and climate change (Wapner Reference Wapner1996). While studies of environmentalism have focussed on how movements target private and public sector organisations, it has become evident that contemporary environmental movements are active across the public and private divide (Ronit and Schneider Reference Ronit and Schneider2013). At the same time as the environmental performance of corporations and public authorities can be challenged more or less aggressively from an external location (MacKay and Munro Reference MacKay and Munro2012), more subtle collaborative approaches are widespread and popular (Kourula and Halme Reference Kourula and Halme2008, Pacheco, York and Hargrave Reference Pacheco, York and Hargrave2014), especially in the advancement of ‘corporate environmentalism’ (Mirvis Reference Mirvis1994, Hoffman Reference Hoffman2001, Bowen Reference Bowen2014) and ‘CEO activism’ (Chatterji and Toffel Reference Chatterji and Toffel2018). This results in tight alliances between businesses and civil society that prosper based on multiplying notions of commercial activisms (see Table A.1 in Appendix).

Large parts of social theory nonetheless treat activism, and specifically environmentalism, as something that happens externally, separate from state authorities and businesses, for example via ‘challenger movements’ (Bertels, Hoffman and DeJordy Reference Bertels, Hoffman and DeJordy2014) or even ‘shareholder activists’ (Goranova and Verstegen Ryan, Reference Goranova and Ryan2014). This external position has furthermore been emphasised as being of theoretical importance. It secures the possibility of ‘true critique’ delivered from an outsider position with a clear political target or ‘anti’ (Dixon Reference 261Dixon2014:220). The question is nevertheless whether such a clean and clear-cut external position is still fruitful to uphold, empirically and theoretically, if we are curious about climate activism in the energy transition.

In the world of work, internal political acts have long been recognised as playing an important role. Whether through whistleblowing (e.g. Weiskopf and Tobias-Miersch Reference Weiskopf and Tobias-Miersch2016), union activism (Byford and Wong Reference Byford and Wong2016) or humour (Taylor and Bain Reference Taylor and Bain2003, Fogarty and Elliot Reference Fogarty and Elliot2020), there are innovative ways in which people can enact their political imaginaries at work (Scott Reference Scott1990). While the emphasis in such studies of resistance has been on organisational hierarchies, and how workers attempt to counter managers to improve exploitative work conditions (Bain and Taylor Reference Bain and Taylor2000, Ekman Reference 262Ekman2014), research on activism in workplaces underscores the existence of wider political movements and links to society at large (Meyerson and Scully Reference Meyerson and Scully1995, Scully and Segal Reference Scully and Segal2002, Skoglund and Böhm Reference Skoglund and Böhm2020). Here, activism is studied as a boundaryless political force, rather than as a co-construction of corporate responsibility (e.g. see Sonenshein, Reference Sonenshein2016, Girschik Reference 265Girschik2020), with the aim to understand how a political movement may take shape within organisations that on the surface look apolitical, or by contrast, are outspokenly political.

A clear case of the latter in the energy transition is Ecotricity, one of the UK’s biggest renewable energy companies, founded by the activist and ecopreneur Dale Vince. Ecotricity not only lobbies for greener governmental policies and strict climate change targets, the company also takes an activist stance against fellow energy businesses, particularly the emerging fracking industry, producing campaign videos that have a lot in common with those produced by environmental activists. ‘In fact, Ecotricity has teamed up with Friends of the Earth, one of the largest and most influential green NGOs, in its campaign to oppose fracking in the UK’ (Böhm and Skoglund Reference Böhm and Skoglund2015). On the one hand, Ecotricity follows economic reasoning, clearly wishing to position itself as a green champion, gaining a competitive advantage in the energy market (Cronin et al. Reference Cronin, Smith, Gleim, Ramirez and Jennifer Martinez2011). On the other hand, it also seems to follow, invent and sustain certain political imaginaries, fortifying the ideas and hopes many people have of a greener world to come, via very material means.

Descriptive insights on how the environmental movement, and specifically climate actions, are increasingly becoming enmeshed in a variety of organisational settings can be found in both popular culture and various academic fields. This book will engage with both to analyse a set of ethnographically collected empirical materials, mainly based in the UK, by finding common ground in social movement theory, political science and organisation and management studies. We need to establish a cross-disciplinary conceptual understanding between these three areas of thought, due to our research interest in a climate activism that is productive of a rich variety of organisational arrangements, and especially those that bridge business and society. This broad theoretical, and for some readers perhaps excessively panoramic, approach is also vital due to already established intellectual exchanges between these three areas, and a resonance with the empirical experiences we have had in the field. Instead of holding on to the academic canon, it thus seems more fruitful to let go and craft an experimental attitude towards existing studies.

While social movement theory mostly focusses its explanatory power on environmental non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other civil society groups (Yaziji and Doh Reference 292Yaziji and Doh2010, Vasi Bogdan Reference Vasi Bogdan2011, Fisher and Nasrin Reference Fisher and Nasrin2021), political science authors have developed concepts of green deliberative democracy and citizen voicing (Smith Reference Smith2009, Bäckstrand Reference Bäckstrand, Khan, Kronsell and Lövbrand.2010, Dryzek Reference Dryzek2013) that stretch to the remains of grassroots activism in political programmes of ‘energy democracy’ (Burke and Stephens Reference Burke and Stephens2017, Szulecki Reference Szulecki2018). A blending of activism and formal politics is also advanced when ideas of ‘ecological modernisation’ (Hajer Reference Hajer1995) are brought into studies of renewable energy technology development (Toke Reference Toke2011b). This focus on modernisation has been taken up by Corporate Social Responsibility scholars (e.g. see Curran Reference Curran2015), especially those with an interest in ‘ecological citizenship’ (Crane, Matten and Moon Reference Crane, Matten and Moon2008a:167, Reference Crane, Matten and Moon2008b:151), including voluntary engagements driven by managers’ personal values (Hemingway and Maclagan Reference Hemingway and Maclagan2004). Conceptually, however, these studies keep the environmental activist in an external position, occasionally to be brought in to be managed or governed.

In contrast, scholars have slowly begun to investigate how ‘internal activists’ (Wickert and Schaefer Reference Wickert and Schaefer2015:107, also see Briscoe and Gupta Reference Briscoe and Gupta2016) and ‘organisational activists’ (Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman Reference Spicer, Alvesson and Kärreman2009:552) enliven all sorts of political imaginaries in professional contexts. Among these approaches we find researchers who seek to understand how minorities and marginalised members change and recompose their world at work (Zald and Berger Reference Zald and Berger1978, Scully and Segal Reference Scully and Segal2002, Marens Reference Marens2013). Early on, Meyerson and Scully (Reference Meyerson and Scully1995:589) developed the concept of ‘tempered radicals’ to describe organisational members who are ‘outsiders within’. These are individuals who ‘may be playing parts in movements bigger than themselves and their organisations’ to accomplish change, starting with their organisation (Meyerson and Scully Reference Meyerson and Scully1995:598). In contrast, ‘internal activists’ can also be conceived as less disruptive and more aligned with already established and accepted corporate responsibility and core values that need to be properly acted upon. Girschik (Reference 265Girschik2020:35) states that ‘internal activists believe in and identify with corporate responsibility and may mobilise others in an endeavour to promote different ways of thinking about and doing business’. The activist struggles undertaken are in this latter case often smoother since the internal activists seldom disrupt the core business. Yet how citizen-activists, businesses and state actors are entangled by activism pursued at work is still not well recognised and understood (cf. Briscoe and Gupta Reference Briscoe and Gupta2016:673).

These previous studies on business organisations show that activism is either seen to enter business, to work from the outside-in, or alternatively, that activism grows in a bottom-up manner, spurred by notions of corporate responsibility to work inside-out (Davis and White Reference Davis and White2015). In the case of the energy transition and environmental employee activism, however, such empirical distinctions are hard to sustain (Skoglund and Böhm Reference Skoglund and Böhm2020). Focussing on the organisation as the level of analysis, with its inter-dynamics of ‘inside-out’ or ‘outside-in’, including diverse forms of ‘boundary work’ (Langley et al. Reference Langley, Lindberg, Mørk, Nicolini, Raviola and Walter2019) is insufficient and unsatisfactory due to the boundaryless attribute of climate activism. Tellingly, the intensified calls for climate actions, with a spread of activism across domains, have thus also been studied by a growing number of scholars taking an interest in ‘green inside activists’ in state agencies (Hochstetler and Keck Reference 269Hochstetler and Keck2007, Olsson and Hysing Reference Olsson and Hysing2012, Hysing and Olsson Reference Hysing and Olsson2018, Abers Reference Abers2019). While these studies still show how activists wish to transform how the green environment is treated within their own organisation (with policy implications), they also illustrate the existence of a much stronger will to connect actions taken ‘from within’ to others in efforts to accomplish a wider transformation. Hence, insider or employee activism can thus utilise a host organisation as a means for political ends.

Before the boundaryless attribute of activism was spotted in relation to employee activism and insider activism, it was well observed in digital activism (Hill and Hughes Reference Hughes1998, Maxey Reference Maxey1999, Postill Reference Postill2018), and perhaps boundaryless activism is easier to accept when tracing activism digitally. Through digital tools, it has been suggested that political enactment travels in a less regulated manner, from keyboard to keyboard and screen to screen, across the Internet between interconnected countries via ‘cybercitizens’, ‘transnational citizenship’ and ‘virtual communities’ (Hill and Hughes Reference Hughes1998), for example in the case of the Arab Spring (Mason Reference Mason2013) and the #MeToo movement. In contrast to a traditional leftist historicity of organised revolution, digital activism therefore resonates with theories of dispersed and disorganised activism, flowing flexibly across the political spectrum (Meyer and Tarrow Reference Meyer and Tarrow1998), shaped by digital networks and fluid communities that transcend local and global politics (Reitan Reference Reitan and Olesen2010), disconnected from a specific activist citizen and target group (Mercea Reference Mercea2016).

The political dimension and effects of this expansive digital activism are nevertheless debatable (cf. Fileborn and Loney-Howes Reference Fileborn and Loney-Howes2019, Dean Reference Dean, Chandler and Fuchs2019). The spontaneous and processual character of ‘hashtag activisms’, with their ‘algorithmic politics’ and affective potentialities, demand the recognition ‘that there is no politically pure position from which to operate’ (Pedwell Reference Pedwell2019:134). There is no longer an ‘outside’ to neoliberalism and capitalism, or at least, no longer a safe one (Dean Reference Dean, Chandler and Fuchs2019:179). Digital activism performs from ‘within’ (Vlavo Reference Vlavo2018), and the pressing question that both activists and academics ask themselves relates to this repositioning or even trans-valuation of politics: how can you work from within established structures, systems and hierarchies, with a wish to outmanoeuvre them, without yourself being defined by them (Scoones, Leach and Newell Reference Scoones, Leach and Newell2015)?

Inspired by this repositioning of activism, our main priority is not to better understand how activism permeates professional organisations and sometimes grows from the inside via so-called ‘internal’ activists. We are much more interested in thinking about climate activism as boundaryless and in relation to the ‘complexity’ that climate change repeatedly has been offering to political decision-makers (e.g. see, Schneider and Kuntz-Duriseti Reference Schneider and Kuntz-Duriseti2002, Heazle Reference Heazle2010, IPCC, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2014:114, Incropera Reference Incropera2016). This has generated a wide range of ‘uncertainties’ that are not only making decision-making difficult but alongside which warnings of post-political conditions (Wilson and Swyngedouw Reference Wilson and Swyngedouw2014) and de-politicisation (Evans and Reid Reference Evans and Reid2014) have grown. That is, hand in hand with the realisation that agreement on formal political decisions to mitigate climate change has been problematic, follows a general tendency to configure human behaviour based on adaptation and a capacity to cope (Chandler and Reid Reference Chandler and Reid2016). At the same time, as emphasised earlier in this Introduction, it is notable that calls for ‘action’ seek to complement ‘adaptation’, and that uncertainty is constructively met by the material-mental promises of renewable energy, its allure of infinity and hope.

There are very few question marks and precautions regarding renewable technologies, it seems. So, alongside all the political complexities and de-politicising uncertainties, climate activism spreads via renewables productively across organisations, but perhaps without any distinct cultivation of a political subject, namely an identifiable activist nurtured as a unified collective (Decreus, Lievens and Braeckman Reference Decreus, Lievens and Braeckman2014). Hence, just as the energy system is in transition, it appears that so too is activism. The energy transition corrals and is infused by a boundaryless activism, indistinct political subjectivity and yet a forceful human relationality. To trace and understand this prolific environmental movement, we thus suggest there should be less focus on individuals identified as activists, and more analytical attention paid to the sort of human relationality and organisational force that underpins climate activism. To accomplish this shift in perspective, we turn to knowledge production about community formation, and specifically a theoretical expansion of the very limited concept of ‘epistemic communities’ (Haas Reference Haas1992). This concept and slightly outdated framework were developed with other political complexities and uncertainties in mind: post-Cold War international affairs (Zito Reference Zito2018).

Climate Activism and Community Formation

We only affiliate ourselves loosely with existing research on epistemic communities, previously mainly understood as a community of professionals and experts who share knowledge to steer changes in policy when there is high uncertainty and political complexity. In contrast to Haas’ (Reference Haas1992) analytical focus on hierarchies and causal relations that are assumed to follow instrumental and strategic flows of knowledge or discursive regularities, this book provides an analytical shift, more akin to a broader affirmation of epistemic movements (Knorr Cetina Reference Knorr Cetina1999).

We are, however, not so interested in how scientists take the leading role in cultural machineries. Instead, we are fascinated by how everyone is assumed to become an expert, especially regarding an awareness of their own political capacities to be ‘green’, accessed and released as ‘actions’, via practical and reflexive knowledge mobilised by renewables.

The aim is to expand the conception of epistemic community as a vehicle to better understand the movement of knowledge that underpins climate activism and renewable energy actions, taken in the everyday, across different organisational domains (cf. Gough and Shackley Reference Gough and Shackley2001). This shared formation of knowledge or ‘episteme’ that spawns community formation can thus be more generatively conceived as a ‘field of scientificity’, moulded through discourses, institutions and laws, but grounded in philosophical and philanthropic historicities, including contemporary moral trends and practices (Foucault Reference Foucault and Gordon1980:195–197). To make the most of a reconceptualisation of ‘epistemic community’, and give it the explanatory power it deserves, we will thus turn to a broad set of theories and definitions of community. This will make it possible to study climate activism and account for the boundaryless and dispersed mobilisations of knowledge that thrive on, and accomplish, the transition of the energy system.

A focus on knowledge movements and expertise is not necessarily novel, but there is still plenty of scope to further develop Haas’ (Reference Haas1992) original conception (Zito Reference Zito2001, Davis Cross Reference Davis Cross2013, Zito Reference Zito2018), and especially so when taken out of a pure political science context. Just as we have seen a scholarly advancement of different types of activism, so too have definitions and studies of types of community prospered, from ecological communities (Böhm, Bharucha and Pretty Reference Böhm, Bharucha and Pretty2015) to sustainable communities (Grim and Tucker Reference Grim and Tucker2014), policy communities (Stone Reference 287Stone2008), occupational communities (Van Maanen Reference Van Maanen2010), brand and consumption communities (Antorini, Muñiz Jr and Askildsen Reference Antorini, Muñiz and Askildsen2012) and energy communities (Bauwens et al. Reference Bauwens, Schraven, Drewing, Radtke, Holstenkamp, Gotchev and Yildiz2022 in press). This shows that the dated field of community studies is going through a revival, giving rise to an increased awareness of the human will to gather and socialise, even professionally, building further on studies of close communities (Harrigan, Achananuparp and Lim Reference Harrigan, Achananuparp and Lim2012) or communities of practice (Wenger Reference Wenger1998, Reference Wenger2010).

Compared with how in the 1960s ‘the community’ was increasingly grafted onto a notion that could counter tensions and potential isolation of individuals in ‘mass society’ (Rose Reference Rose1996:332), with climate change ‘community’ has grown in popularity and been extended to ethico-political programmes that seek to nurture resilient communities (Zebrowski and Sage Reference Zebrowski and Sage2017). Particularly in the German language, this present and historical moral function of community is still apparent. ‘Aktiengesellschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft mit beschränkter Haftung (GmbH)’ are juridical terms for profit-oriented companies, while Gemeinschaft (community) implies that a group of people are assembled by ties other than, or beyond, just economic ties and instrumentality. In our study of climate activism, it will become evident that Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft are intertwined (e.g. see Adler Reference Adler2015, Bershady Reference Bershady, Christensen and Levinson2020), and fundamental for new political imaginaries of what ‘a community’ might become in the transition to a sustainable society.

A focus on how community relations unfold with the production and dissemination of knowledge about climate change will generate insights into the new outlook of activism, one that is mobilised by a personalisation that differs from the activist saying ‘the personal is political’ (Bennett and Segerberg Reference 254Bennett and Segerberg2011). There is a looser connection between the individual and the group, and a weaker construction of a ‘we’ against a ‘them’ (cf. Decreus, Lievens and Braeckman Reference Decreus, Lievens and Braeckman2014). This makes the collective identity vague but therefore inclusive (Decreus, Lievens and Braeckman Reference Decreus, Lievens and Braeckman2014), especially in ‘pro’ movements where the role of the adversary is either abstract or becoming distant. No longer can activism be understood as one coherent ‘thing’, located in one place and carried out by one set of people, with one shared identity, in one way only. Activism is rather conceived as, and constructed to be, multiple. By taking different empirical and theoretical positions, a greater variety has been identified, moulded through corporatism and deliberation to localism and ‘prefiguration’ (e.g. see Boggs Reference Boggs1977). Enabled by pluralist perspectives, it has become possible to talk about ‘multiple green transformations’ (Leach and Scoones Reference Leach, Scoones, Scoones, Leach and Newell2015:119) and increased varieties of activism (Jamison Reference Jamison2001:147–175), for example pursued by ‘the rich’ (Dauvergne Reference Dauvergne2016). By empirically tracing renewable energy actions taken in the everyday, our study of epistemic communities will consequently enable us to better understand the organisational force of climate activism and how it revels in the asserted complexities of a changing political landscape, continuously redefined by the problem of climate change (e.g. see Wittneben et al. Reference Wittneben, Okereke, Subhabrata Banerjee and Levy2012).

Outline of the Book

Chapter 1, Boundaryless Activism, illustrates the changed outlook of activism. The boundaryless attribute of activism is clarified by examples of how activism has gone into business, and how business has gone into activism. The reader is introduced to the growing genre of commercial activism with a potpourri of activism notions: from activist entrepreneurship or enterprising activism to brand activism, CEO activism, employee activism and consumer activism (see Table A.1 in Appendix). By means of an overview of how these overlapping examples of commercial activism work based on environmentalism, the chapter points to how climate activism bridges the domains of business and society. The purpose is to acknowledge a more complicated picture of activism and move towards a conception of activism as disconnected from civil society, which is required to enable an empirical tracing of climate activism.

This commercial backdrop to climate activism will be useful for a better understanding of the four empirical chapters. By comparing different types of activist business strategy, the reader can additionally reflect on these aided by critical perspectives presented in both popular culture media and academic journals, and learn about their differences. A common difference between corporate engagement in formal politics (sometimes called corporate activism) and (business) enterprising activism is the creation of a coherent value chain in the latter – a strategic coherence that spans from the activist entrepreneur to the employee activist and consumer activist, offered to build a collective movement, sometimes in terms of a ‘community’ that bridges business and society. This insight prepares the reader for the empirics, and illustration of the dispersed way in which climate activism and its collective force is facilitated via renewable energy actions. We end by arguing that the various types of commercial activism presented in the chapter offer a significant change in speed, one that may become increasingly alluring when climate adaptations are extended to climate actions – actions to be taken sooner rather than later in the ‘here and now’ to respond adequately to the climate emergency. Conclusively, activism that thrives on business is, for some, considered as ‘political’, yet more effective, than any other form of activism.

Chapter 2, The Activist–Business–State Conglomeration, builds further on the boundaryless attribute of climate activism by illustrating how activism has gone into state authorities, and how state authorities have gone into activism. By tracing how the citizen is increasingly called on as a passionate and energetic force and potential activist, the chapter outlines how climate activism is becoming even more dispersed and diffuse when bolstered through formal political bodies. By means of a short contextualisation of the UK policy landscape on renewable energy, with an emphasis on how a deliberative democratic agenda has expanded and taken root, the chapter prepares the reader for contextual details in the four empirical chapters. The UK political agenda on climate adaptation, consensual deliberation and a top-down creation of market pull has been slowly revised by a call for climate actions and its collective force, resulting in community building and a bottom-up market push. To go beyond the view that policy drives activism, the latter part of the chapter is attentive to the formation of an activist–business–state conglomeration, important for the recognition of activism as boundaryless, increasingly commercially defined and without a confinement to civil society. The reader is introduced to examples of prosumer activism, investor activism and insider activism (see Table A.1 in Appendix). The conclusion is that boundaryless climate activism predominantly speeds up the energy transition with an affirmation of affluent transformations and a fiscal energy ‘revolution’. Climate activism can thus be governed in less counter-aggressive ways, with soft empowering approaches that seek consensus and behavioural change via knowledge co-production, including climate actions taken in good faith, especially via hopeful renewable energy community building. However, because of its characteristics of being less obvious and less aggressive, more about community relations than demonstrations in the street, climate activism can also find alternative ways to reproduce and prosper, before becoming governable anew. In light of this to-and-fro, the chapter problematises the analytical means for studying boundaryless activism. Somehow, there is a need to take into consideration the trendy talk about climate actions coupled with an overt embracement of its collective form and force – by policymakers, business organisations and citizens – as well as the pursuit of such actions and collectivity within specific empirical settings.

Chapter 3, Activism and Its Collective Force, first traces the basic theoretical assumptions in studies of activism, to then do the same for community. Especially in the energy transition, ‘community’ is a political imaginary that has been widely seen as a normative force to accomplish sustainable development through intimately connected people, embracing a biospheric vitality and relation to the Earth. ‘Community’ has historically been used more than ‘activism’, for a bridging across business and society. However, the question is how boundaryless activism can be thought of in relation to community formation when the notion of ‘civil society’ is slowly becoming redundant and affinities with nature are being emphasised. The aim is therefore to get closer to a new way of analysing activism and its collective force, or ‘community’, by first engaging in existing theories and three main basic assumptions in studies of activism: resistance, struggle and political subjectivity; a demarcation between words and actions; and the human capacity to relate in various ways to others and come together. This last aspect of coming together is thereafter discussed in relation to theories on community formation with a focus on community and togetherness, nihilism, locality, capitalism, business and neoliberalism. We theoretically explore how the changing political landscape and trans-valuation of what can be considered ‘political’ is linked to a revival of community relations and political imaginaries of togetherness. At the same time as scholars have theorised ‘the citizen’ as less instrumental and more complicated – in effect a human with very diverse passions and will to take action beyond deliberation – community formation has been reintroduced as a potential host for the grouping of such complex human diversity. The chapter particularly notes the link between the autonomous individual, assumed to be found in expressions of activism, and how this individual has been differently balanced up by a collective formation of togetherness in expressions of community. This draws attention to the available conceptual resources and possibilities to study boundaryless climate activism in relation to its collective force, enabled by renewables and a knowledge movement, or ‘epistemic community’.

Chapter 4, Epistemic Community, explores the different ways that communities of expertise have been studied previously, to then expand the reach of this analytical frame. This is of particular importance for a study of climate activism, which is infused by all sorts of pedagogic and educational trends, enacted by NGOs to pedagogues in nurseries, designed to be internalised and materially acted upon. As richly exemplified in the previous chapters, the applicability of this knowledge movement is also facilitated by technical and financial solutions, such as renewable energy technologies and European Union (EU)-sanctioned crowdfunding platforms. The epistemic movement, fortified by science on climate change, encompasses more than a scientific episteme – it vitalises a specific way of knowing, co-producing and applying knowledge. By reconceptualising epistemic community, the aim is to affirm this extensive knowledge movement to explain the workings of boundaryless climate activism in relation to its collective force.

We do so by turning to the historical notions of Gemeinschaft (community) and Gesellschaft (society/association), and Tönnies’ (Reference Tönnies1957/2002) interest in the stimulation of public opinion via increased civic education. It is the interplay between Gesellschaft, which is based on knowledge, and Gemeinschaft, based on imaginings and relationality, that is still relevant in understanding more contemporary forms of activism. This conceptual pair can accomplish an analytical shift, from evident sources of expertise, to co-production of knowledge by the activist–business–state conglomeration. The chapter discusses how ‘community’, as an other-than-economic organisational force, combines with ideas about Bildung, renewed in the realisation that ‘knowledge’ itself is of utmost importance in the transition to a sustainable society. Contemporary Bildung processes, accordingly, secure human relationality based on unknowns and unknown outcomes within, what we call, an ‘epistemic community’. This inclusion of Bildung within the epistemic community can thus help us to analytically grasp how renewable energy technology infuses ‘action’ by eliciting self-transformation and a reinvention of others. Acknowledging a more generative membership within the epistemic community furthermore facilitates an analysis of the dispersed actions and diffuse collective force that were experienced during the research in the field.

Chapter 5, Climate Activism at Vattenfall, mainly builds on our ethnographic study of people in Sweden and the UK who work with wind power development at Vattenfall, a multinational state-owned energy utility active across Europe (Skoglund and Böhm Reference Skoglund, Böhm, Bulkeley, Paterson and Stripple2016). After contextualising the greening of Vattenfall and positioning this brand activism in relation to external activists, especially Greenpeace, the chapter illustrates how Vattenfall early on adopted commercial activisms, such as CEO activism. The main empirics is nevertheless based on studies of the employees, both with regard to how they have been facilitated to form their own green activism and how they have taken initiatives beyond environmental management and efforts to harness their green personal politics via Green Human Resource Management. Despite all the green initiatives at Vattenfall, the company continued in parallel with a range of heavily polluting activities, creating dilemmas for how to manage a rich variety of personal politics and forceful passions acted out at work. So-called epistemic struggles emerged, enacted in meetings between employees within the various units at Vattenfall. Hence, these struggles refer to strongly differing opinions about the energy resources exploited, from nuclear to lignite, and from wind to hydropower. The struggles also meant that a collectivity was shaped by how renewables were spoken about on a daily basis, verbally constructed in clashes with other knowledge formations and concerns. An ‘epistemic community’ was consequently formed around a movement of employees who negotiated and co-produced knowledge about environmental degradation and climate change, including their hands-on actions in the office and beyond.

Chapter 6, Climate Activism via Small and Medium-Sized Enterprises, looks more closely at business organisations in the UK to grasp and illustrate how environmentally aware and concerned individuals, including individuals who self-identify as environmental activists, have started small and medium-sized businesses, collaborating closely with green NGOs and social movements, local government and other businesses. Here, climate activism is going into business, detailed in the case of Small R. Energy (pseudonym), a small, privately owned company based in south-west England, and in Localism for Renewables (pseudonym), also based in the south-west, which is a small community interest company. The chapter additionally introduces bigger companies, namely Ecotricity and Good Energy, known to be led by passionate environmentalists. Their activism has resulted in economically successful renewable energy start-ups, working UK-wide. Enterprising activism in this case refers to ambitions to utilise commercial means to reach environmental ends, seen in how activists schooled in business seek to accomplish environmental and social changes based on new business models, redistributive monetary flows and, commonly, a lot of passionate voluntary work. The chapter illustrates that it is often society and the planet as such that are considered to be at stake and that business is merely the vehicle to take action collectively to achieve faster social and environmental outcomes.

Chapter 7, Climate Activism in Governmental Authorities, is based on our interviews and observations of council workers and public servants in various authorities in south-west England. We specifically describe their work practices and environmental actions within county councils, analysing how they use their position to affect positive change and speed up the transition via business. They have deliberately chosen to work in local government councils to take actions to a collective level, and rely on a mix of educational backgrounds and previous experience of environmentalism, from environmental theatre, festivals and green documentary filmmaking to charity work and entrepreneurship in smaller businesses. Commonly with a left or centre left political agenda, they are based in the council offices where they become immersed in bureaucracy, learning how to utilise it for their enterprising environmental ambitions. This has resulted in what the chapter identifies to be horizontal organising, sometimes in parallel with, and at other times morphed into, top-down politics and deliberative democracy, knowledge co-production and renewable energy empowerment. This insider activism is fully focussed on working with and for local people, developing enterprising renewable energy solutions via the activist–business–state conglomeration. The chapter concludes that insider activism plays an intricate part in these public bureaucracies at the same time as it mobilises the epistemic community further to affect change at a local level.

Chapter 8, Climate Activism via Citizen Groups, describes climate actions taken by people who wish to be in control of their own production and consumption of renewable energy. Citizens are mobilised to facilitate public/private energy initiatives, whereby the ‘citizen’ and ‘consumer’ have become increasingly conflated and merged into the new category of ‘prosumer’. Test sites and product advisory forums are initiated in a bottom-up manner, as the chapter illustrates in the case of the Decarbonised Living Project, launched in Farmers Village (pseudonyms), a small rural village in south-west England. By virtue of similar initiatives, information is gained about users interpellated as participative citizens, or even activists, at the same time as the implementation of technical solutions is facilitated via volunteer activities and free affective labour that constitute climate actions, as detailed in the case of Seaside Town Renewable Energy Network, a not-for-profit co-operative that is part of the transition town movement Love Seaside Town (pseudonyms). Love Seaside Town invests time and energy into enlightening their neighbours about green energy switching options and solar panel investments, seeking to make their fellow citizens more participative.

In this chapter we also get closer to the everyday struggles of climate activism, for instance illustrating how prosumers need consultancy aid to set up complex legal structures to be able to redistribute profits differently from normal businesses, to support life locally. The two cases thus clarify how environmentalism transforms with new knowledge, mobilised both by a ‘grassroots innovation movement’ that seeks control over the implementation phase (Smith and Ely Reference 286Smith, Ely, Scoones, Leach and Newell2015:107) and a consumption community that thrives on newness, progression and passion (West and Lakhani Reference West and Lakhani2008). It becomes evident that renewable energy actions thrive on a positive and constructive perspective, turning hero stories about struggles with business into love stories about collaborations with business. Unavoidably with tensions between activism and business, the chapter highlights how a desire for sustainability and self-sufficiency leads to intensified local relations of exchange, either monetarily or as gift economies, concluding that people have experienced success in reaching their goals, at the same time as they have experienced exhaustion and a lack of longevity of activism.

Chapter 9, New Ways of Knowing, summarises how the various renewable energy actions presented in the four empirical chapters thrive on a knowledge movement, making individual actions into possible collective endeavours. The chapter discusses this formation of an epistemic community in relation to previously established movements, such as localism, collectivism, prefiguration and alternative forms of entrepreneurship, to further explore the boundaryless attribute of climate activism encountered in the empirical chapters. Through our conceptual expansion of epistemic communities, we also provide details on how activism bridges the domains of business and society differently. We summarise the main findings according to four themes on new ways of knowing, namely: experiment and Do-It-Yourself; share and Do-It-Together; wander and speed up; alter and materialise. This suggests that the epistemic community not only lays the foundations for the same topics – the climate emergency, renewable energy and swift action – but also opens up for a certain way of knowing through experimentation, sharing, wandering, altering and materialising.

Chapter 10, Horizontal Organising, summarises and critically reflects on the main findings and arguments to bring forth both theoretical and policy implications. The chapter concludes that a more inclusive and expanded concept of epistemic communities is useful for understanding how climate activism and renewable energy actions bridge business and society, speeding up the energy transition horizontally. The chapter elaborates on how renewable energy technology facilitates horizontality, to then discuss horizontal organising generated by an outsourcing of deliberation attempts, followed by horizontality that arises with the increasingly popular trend of prefigurative politics. Based on this emphasis on horizontality, the chapter ends by specifying four new elements of importance for a more generous conceptualisation of epistemic community: feral proximity, epistemic struggles, radical equality and human relationality. This broader understanding of epistemic community offers analytical possibilities to move beyond a study of activism and actions rooted in a specific source of activism, for example an activist conceived as a political subject, of importance for tracing boundaryless activisms, of which climate activism is a prime example.